Rackspace Hosting may pursue an IPO (initial public offering) later this year, according to Bloomberg. The report suggests the managed cloud services provider (CSP) could have a $10 billion valuation.
Apollo Global Management acquired Rackspace for $4.3 billion and took the company private in 2016. At the time, the hosting provider was pivoting from traditional public cloud services toward managed cloud services for third-party platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
The strategy, essentially: If you can't beat the cloud giants head-on, assist customers with workload management, monitoring and security across those preferred clouds.
As part of the evolution, Rackspace had layoffs and a CEO change in early 2017, and acquired Datapipe for multi-cloud management capabilities later that year for $800 million. Another acquisition, involving TriCore Solutions, pushed the company toward managed services for Oracle and SAP applications.
More recently, Rackspace has introduced managed security services for third-party clouds. Neither Apollo nor Rackspace replied to Bloomberg's request for comment.
